


No Place Like Home

by servantofclio



Series: Sewers to Stars [4]
Category: Mass Effect, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1497460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After she left New York to enlist, Shepard thought she'd come home again... but not like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

After the Alliance picks Shepard up from Akuze, she is treated for dehydration, mild hypothermia, and an array of acid burns. She is debriefed, more than once, the story growing flat and dry in the retelling. She meets with one therapist, and then another, and answers questions and submits obediently to neural scans and psychiatric evaluations. 

 

Eventually, Shepard asks if she can take leave. 

 

It’s granted, though, she thinks, reluctantly. The psychologist she talked to is probably afraid she’ll just disappear: her records say she has no home, no family ties, hardly any close friends before her enlistment. But they don’t have a good excuse to keep her. If she did have a family to go home to, they’d definitely grant her leave, rather than keeping her at the Alliance military hospital on Arcturus for another few weeks of evaluations. 

 

She does have a home and a family to go to, or at least, she did. The Alliance just doesn’t know that.

 

Then again, she hasn’t told anyone she’s coming back, either.

 

On Arcturus, it always felt like someone was watching her, so she didn’t call. As she straps herself into the cramped seat of the commercial transport, she has time to contemplate her choices, to regret how long it’s been since the last time she called or sent a message. She’s been stationed off-planet, surrounded by people, with hardly enough time and never enough privacy to feel entirely comfortable. She closes her eyes and tries to sleep through the journey.

 

Once she gets to New York, she walks. It’s a good city for walking. She walks up one street and down another, matching the brisk pace of the crowds. She wears plain, dark civvies and boots, her lone duffel bag slung over her shoulder. No one looks twice at her, even with her shaved head and her gaunt cheeks. It’s been a long time since she was in a place like this. There are no open wastes, no monsters erupting out of the ground, no stars. The city smells like people and smoke and eezo from all the mass-effect-powered cars that have mostly replaced the old internal combustion engines. She lets herself fit into the flow of the crowds, lets herself be moved by the tidal surges of humanity. She stops for a cup of coffee, and later, she grabs a slice of pizza, New York style (big and flat and floppy) and eats it as she walks. The drumbeat of her heels against the pavement reminds her of the call she’s not making. She could do it, now that she’s on-planet and unobserved. More than once she reaches for her omni-tool, and more than once she lets her hand fall back to her side, her fingers curling into a fist. She can’t even quite say why she doesn’t do it.

 

It’s been five years since she was in New York. She pushes away the twinge of guilt at that thought and tries to think. How long has it been since she last sent a message? Six month, at least— eight? Nine? She could push the button and send another one, right now. 

 

She doesn’t. The more she thinks about it, and doesn’t, the more her guts curl up inside her. As the air cools toward dusk and the shadows of tall buildings darken the city streets, Shepard considers her options. If she still doesn’t want to make that call, from here she has two: she can go up, or down.

 

Down is straightforward. Any manhole cover will do. She’s pretty sure remembers how to get around, and while it’s always possible they’ve picked up and moved, there’s only so long she can go banging around in the sewer system without tripping over part of Donnie’s extensive perimeter security. On the other hand, there’s no telling what tripping that security would do to her, or what else is hanging out in the sewers these days, or whether the routes have changed due to construction or flooding or...

 

Up is more physically taxing. She remembers the old patrol routes, too, and it won’t take her that long to find her way to a hot spot or two and lurk to see if anyone’s out on patrol. It’s getting dark, so... should be soon. The view’s good, too, and the air’s fresher than the sewers. But if she goes up, she has a much better chance of missing everyone altogether.

 

Down is logical. She hasn’t felt logical since Akuze, though, and she finally recognizes the tightening in her gut for what it is.

 

The truth is, she left five years ago, and she’s been a shitty correspondent. A shitty friend. Her messages have been sporadic, even to April, short and awkward. She should have come back years ago. She certainly could have, right? She’d had leave before. She could have bought herself a ticket back to Earth, but... she thought that one day she’d come back  victorious . Proud and bold and full of good stories. With presents, or some damned thing. Something to show for it. Something to justify the fact that she left, some souvenir of traveling the stars. 

 

Not like this. She left, she trained herself into exhaustion, she lost all her people, and her only souvenirs are the glossy scars the acid left.

 

It would serve her right if they were pissed off or resentful—specifically pissed off at her, that is, not Raph’s general state of being eternally pissed off—and she hates the idea of admitting what happened, that she made it out into the stars and what she found there was an acid-spitting nightmare, that she’s come crawling back to lick her wounds because she has nowhere else to go.

 

She doesn’t even know for sure if they’re  there , she realizes. That’s the other fear gnawing away at the back of her brain: they could have moved or even left the city, or they could be...  gone , all of them or one of them...

 

She imagines going down and finding the old lair cold and empty; she imagines the set of brothers broken up, a body without all its limbs, and her chest tightens. That can’t have happened. Surely April or Casey would have found some way to let her know, unless  they’re pissed at her, or they all went down in some conflagration that she’d left them to face without her. It can’t be like that. It just can’t. They have to be okay, because... because that’s what she wants. Needs.

 

She reaches for her omni-tool, but she can’t make herself make the call. Any call. Her finger hovers over the omni-tool interface as she imagines a silent, empty, dirty lair. She thinks about slogging around in the wet hoping the route hasn’t changed and nothing is rigged with explosives or tranquilizers or whatever the hell else Donatello’s perfectly understandable paranoia can come up with. She thinks about fresh air and a view over the city, and the tightness in her chest settles into longing. 

 

Up, then.

 

She launches herself up the nearest fire escape. 

 

On the rooftop, the stars aren’t any brighter, really, but the air’s a little clearer. There’s more wind, cooling her face, clearing out the smell of the city. Buildings are turning into black outlines against the fading brilliance of the sunset as she moves. After walking in crowds for the last few hours, it’s a pleasure to let her muscles loosen up and move freely. She’s out of practice, but the rooftops are still close together, and she can still make the jumps. It’s like old times. Down on the street, she remembered what it was like to be part of a crowd, to be out and moving around in an inhabited place. Blending in, nobody recognizing her or even suspecting the hell she’d walked out of. This is what most people’s normal life is like. 

 

But up here is a reminder of freedom. She always used to climb up to get above the heat and the noise and all the damned people. On the roofs, she could see the stars, there was room to move. There still is. Here the city’s a mass of old chimneys and ductwork and the occasional rooftop garden, not a great knot of humanity. Shepard breathes in deep and runs.

 

No wonder she’d wanted to go up rather than down.

 

It takes about twenty minutes for her to find trouble.

 

She’s pausing, watching the stars come out over Brooklyn, her back against a chimney, one leg drawn up so her foot rests flat against the brickwork. She’s not far from her old neighborhood, she realizes distantly, only a few blocks from where she first met the turtles. 

 

Somebody screams. 

 

Shepard springs forward, looking over the edge until she spots the screamer: a figure slight, female, backing down an alley with five men after her. Robbery, maybe. Or something else. It doesn’t matter. Shepard’s heart beats faster and her skin tightens and her mouth spreads out wide into something that’s not quite a grin. She’s not carrying her guns, but she has fists and feet and training and an omni-tool, and she is spoiling for a fight. These are street thugs, not a nest of giant acid-spitting worms. This is something she can fight and  win .

 

She swings herself over the edge and slides down the fire escape until her feet hit the ground, the impact vibrating up her legs. She springs out of the crouch she landed in and grabs the collar of the nearest thug, and hauls back for the punch. The impact of her fist against his face goes all the way up her arm and feels  good . The one next to him lunges toward her, but she shoves his buddy into him, and they both go down in a sprawling heap. The almost-victim screams again and runs. Good. She’s out of the way and Shepard doesn’t have to worry about her, then.

 

With her focus narrowed to her opponents—especially when four more of them come running into the alley—even Shepard doesn’t see the  other figure descending from the heights, until one of the thugs howls and it’s not because she hit him. She registers a dark, stocky figure and the glint of fine steel, and a half-feral smile spreads over her face. She doesn’t hesitate to turn her back on the newcomer, who reciprocates, and for a moment they’re actually in contact, her lean back against something solid and rounded and rough-textured. 

 

Then they both move, and the street thugs don’t stand a chance. The only bad moment comes when one of them pulls a pistol, but it’s like a reflex, by now, for Shepard to hit her omni-tool before he can fire. She gets the techmine off and hears the sweet whine of an overheated gun, and moments later a kick sends the weapon flying out of the thug’s hand.

 

By the time they’re done, half of the guys have run away again, and the other half are on the ground.

 

Adrenalin is still buzzing through Shepard’s system, so the first words out of her mouth are: “I could handle them myself, you know.”

 

“Sure you could.” Raphael wipes off his weapons, slides them into his belt with the usual flourish, and crosses his arms. It’s dark enough she can’t make out his expression. Her gut tightens into a knot again. “Military teach you to wade in when you’re outnumbered?”

 

“No.” Shepard sticks her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “That was all you.”

 

When he moves, she can see that the scowl isn’t one of the really angry ones. She doesn’t have time to relax before Raph punches her in the arm, glaring up at her. “You forget how to write, kid?”

 

“No.” Shepard rubs her arm. It stings. “I just…”

 

“Don’t be a drama queen. I barely tapped you.”

 

She huffs out a breath. “Yeah. I... I’m sorry. I meant to come back before. Or write, I just... didn’t have a lot of privacy in the barracks.” It’s a shitty excuse. Her shoulders draw together, bracing for... something. Another blow, or the tongue-lashing she probably deserves. 

 

“Yeah, you should have,” he says, but he doesn’t sound particularly irritated. “And what, you’re here for a visit, or just to bust some heads?” 

 

“Sure.” Shepard scuffs her foot in the alley’s grime, suddenly graceless and gawky and sixteen again. “Visiting, I mean. If that’s okay. The heads were just... convenient.”

 

“That’s the good thing about bad neighborhoods,” he says. “Always a target when you feel like hitting something.” He starts off down the alley. Shepard takes a step after him and then hesitates, her fists closing inside her pockets, until Raph glances back over his shoulder. “Coming?”

 

“Yeah,” she says, a surge of relief setting her feet into motion.

 

At the mouth of the alley, there’s momentarily enough light that Raph takes a look at her and smirks. “Nice haircut.”

 

Shepard’s mouth twists into a smile. “Thanks.” Some of her hair had come off with the acid. They’d had to shave other parts of it to treat a cut, so she told them to just take it all. She’s like it better if her face weren’t so hollow. She’s lost a surprising amount of weight since Akuze.

 

Once they drop through the nearest manhole, Shepard makes herself ask the question that’s fluttering around in her gut. “Is, uh. How is everyone?” She hasn’t missed that Raph is out alone, and hopes there’s no dire reason for that fact.

 

“Fine. Same old. City doesn’t change much.”

 

“Right,” she says, her nervousness not quite quelled. “But you guys are—”

 

“Pretty much the usual.” A sharp green eye slants toward her. “Thanks for asking.”

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t—”

 

“And stop apologizing.”

 

She bites back another apology and keeps walking. Raph has never really been given to idle conversation, and Shepard tries to find the silence comfortable. It’s not easy, her heart rate ticking up as they go; is it just her imagination, or do these tunnels look more familiar than the ones where they’d entered? Maybe—she’d like to think so—but she’s still not prepared when they stop, Raph moves an ordinary-looking brick, reaches into a hidden recess, and the wall in front of them parts on a burst of light and warmth and noise. Shepard takes a deep breath, and it smells exactly the same as always: that weird mixture of pizza and incense, with whiffs of hot metal and turtle sweat, which doesn’t smell quite the same as human sweat. She freezes on the threshold, but a large, strong hand closes around her wrist to pull her in, down the corridor and into the main room, where Raph calls out, “You find the damnedest things in the alleys, guys, come take a look.”

 

For a moment the sound drops except for the blare of whatever’s on the vidscreen. Shepard summons up a wavering smile, and then she can hardly breathe as Mikey slams into her for a bone-crushing hug.

 

It isn’t like she never left, because greetings like that are for when you last saw someone years ago, not the week before. As she gets passed from one hug to the next (Raph standing by looking smug as if he conjured her up himself), the thing that makes tears prickle under her eyelids is that she’s so obviously  welcome . It’s what coming home  should feel like, something out of a vid or storybook, so she feels even shittier for not coming back  sooner . Nobody says a word about it, though, not even Splinter, who greets her with more restraint than his sons, but with enough warmth that she knows the welcome is real from his end, too. After that they are all talking over each other, showing off five years’ worth of projects and games and accomplishments. April’s out of town, she finds, something to do with her research—”She’ll be sorry she missed you,” Donnie says, but Shepard is relieved to avoid April’s too-perceptive eyes and the suspicion that she’s pushing all of her inner turmoil on the other woman. Casey’s away, too, off visiting relatives. Shepard admits she has several days of leave. “Good,” Leo says, “you can help entertain Mikey, then,” in the face of his younger brother’s scowl.

 

It isn’t until she’s dropping off to sleep on a spare futon that she realizes they asked very few questions, and no one said a word about Akuze. Maybe they don’t know, but the news had gone out on all the Alliance channels, so maybe they  do and are just trying to spare her out of pity—

 

But exhaustion wins, and she sleeps without nightmares that night, for the first time since the rescue team pulled her off Akuze.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Shepard wakes up with her legs aching and her eyes gritty. The dim light of her omni-tool tells her it’s mid-morning, and the voices and sounds of impact coming from the dojo tell her practice is in full swing. Shepard staggers to the kitchen and pours herself a cup of coffee from the half-full pot on the counter. It’s strong enough to make her eyes water. She coughs and finishes it off before pouring another cup and rummaging around for something to eat.

 

She’s finishing up a breakfast of toast and jam and coffee when Michelangelo comes in and frowns at her. “Shepard, you didn’t have to do that. I’d make you some breakfast. You want pancakes? Maybe an omelet?”

 

“You make omelets?”

  
He draws himself up, looking injured. “I make the _best_ omelets.”

 

“You really don’t have to,” she says, sipping the dregs of her coffee.

 

She gets a quick squeeze around the shoulders. “I want to. No problem.”

 

So Shepard finds herself eating a second breakfast, an omelet stuffed full of ham and cheese, and lets Mikey drag her into playing games, where she finds that months spent handling a real rifle give her nothing when it comes to a virtual one. She spends most of the day at it anyway, alternately laughing and swearing at the screen. Come mid-afternoon, she straightens out her aching back and takes a nap, lulled by the ambient noise of familiar voices. By the time she wakes up again, the guys are out on patrol, so she has tea and supper with Splinter. “I’m sorry I didn’t keep in better touch,” she says.

 

“I hear it is the way of children, to leave the nest and never write,” he replies, with a twinkle in his deep eyes.

 

She smiles, her eyes flicking around the familiar clutter of the lair. “Still, I’m sorry. I should have...” she trails off awkwardly. Should have kept contact. Shouldn’t have left at all, maybe.

 

“You have certainly been missed,” he says. “And we are glad you have returned. I understand that when you set your eyes on the future, the past does not always retain its hold.”

 

Shepard fights to keep from squirming in her chair. “That doesn’t make it right, though.”

 

He offers her a small smile, though he does not say _no, it doesn’t_. Instead, he says, “It is good that you are here now.”

 

The next days slide by in much the same way. They let her sleep in long enough that she misses their regular morning practice, although she takes a little time in the afternoons to spar with whoever’s in the mood. Her Alliance hand-to-hand training has its limits, especially pitted against skills honed in daily practice since childhood, but it feels good to work her muscles. She spent too much time sitting, on Arcturus.

 

She spends a day testing the lair’s security with her military-grade omni-tool and arguing with Donnie about encryption.

 

“I’m telling you,” he says, “you can’t just rely on omni-gel all the time.”

 

Shepard snorts. “Says the guy who has an industrial-grade omni-gel fabricator in his lab. Where did you even get that?”

 

“Junkyard,” he says, “it just needed a little refurbishment. It’s useful. Sometimes I need a part I can’t salvage.” Brown eyes narrow at her. “Contrary to popular belief, omni-gel won’t work on every lock. And you don’t always have it, so you need alternatives!”

 

Shepard crosses her arms. “I’m out of omni-gel but I still have my tool? How likely is that?”

 

“All I’m saying is that if you keep up on your decryption algorithms, you have a better capacity to respond to any situation.”

 

Shepard rolls her eyes. Privately, she can admit Donnie has a point. Is she going to admit that out loud? No.

 

“You know I’m right,” he says, folding his arms, like he can hear what she’s thinking.

 

The only response to that is to stick her tongue out. Donnie gives her a superior look. “Real mature, Shepard.”

 

She goes out only once or twice for a couple of uneventful rooftop runs, but the city’s quiet, like Raph said. If it weren’t for the relentless clock on her omni-tool, she might forget the passage of time altogether. It’s so easy to slide into the rhythms of the lair. It occurs to her one night, as she’s drifting to sleep, that she could just... stay. If it was a mistake to go in the first place, she could rectify that now. She could let herself stay here, surrounded and protected and cared for. She could simply not take that flight back to Arcturus at the new round of psych evals waiting for her there. As far as the Alliance is concerned, she would just... disappear. Vanish into the darkness and bustle of the teeming planet, never to be seen again.

 

The thought calls to her, but she doesn’t speak of it to anyone.

 

After that first night, she tells some stories from training, or from her first few assignments. It’s halting at first, but if she sticks to older stories—nothing too recent, nothing too close, nothing about those lost on Akuze—she can loosen up enough to do it, like a normal conversation. They’ve relaxed enough to ask questions, too, but she can see how they stay away from anything recent. She wonders, if she did stay, how long it would be before anyone asked if she was going back.

 

Mikey’s the one who suggests the sci-fi movie marathon, and Shepard’s happy to agree. Laughing at the bad battlefield tactics while Donnie critiques the physics and Raph pretends he’s not enjoying the bad special effects: what’s not to like?

 

Twenty minutes into the third movie, a team of space marines on a desolate planet gets ambushed by unknown alien monsters.

 

Shepard’s mouth goes dry, her palms go damp, and her heart goes into overdrive. She shoves herself up from the floor—tries for quietly, but doesn’t quite manage, because she has to disentangle herself from the blankets and beanbag chairs. She’s covered by the sounds of screams coming from the movie, anyway. Her vision blurs, and her breath is starting to come fast and shallow. She has to get out, but on her way out of the room, she nearly crashes into Donnie, coming back from the kitchen with a fresh bowl of popcorn. “Shepard—” he says.

 

She dodges blindly, shying away from contact. “I gotta... I’ll just...”

 

And then she goes. Over the turnstiles, out the door, around a couple of bends, up through the manhole. It’s dark out, but the glare of streetlights and blare of noise slaps her in the face, sudden and loud, like somebody screaming— _No. Nobody’s screaming_. _That was then. This is now._

 

The air is cool and damp. Must have rained earlier in the day. It feels too thick to breathe. Shepard half-stumbles along the alley until she finds a fire escape. The metal under her hands steadies her, somehow, and she starts climbing without even thinking about it. Her heart is still pounding. She tries to focus on the here and now, like the therapist back on Arcturus said: the hard edges of the metal under her hands and feet, the sounds of traffic in the nearby street, the smoky damp smells of the city. The air is damp. Her cheeks are damp. She’s not crying. She’s alive. What does she have to cry about?

 

Up on the roof, she takes a lungful of air, another, and then she sits, almost falling onto her ass, folding in on herself. She presses her back against the low wall that edges the roof and wraps her arms around her bent knees and presses her face against them. _Breathe_ , she tells herself. _Just breathe_. One breath, two, three...

 

It doesn’t take long before she hears a faint scrape coming from the fire escape, and a silent, heavy presence settles beside her.

 

“I’m... I’ll be fine,” she says, muffled into her knees.

 

“Mikey says he’s sorry,” Leonardo says.

 

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s just a vid.” Instead of sounding casual, her voice comes out choked and tight.

 

“We did hear,” he says after a moment. “About what happened.”

 

“You and the rest of the galaxy.” She means to snort, but it comes out sounding like a sniffle, to her horror, and she squeezes her eyes shut.

 

Leo says, “You don’t have to talk about it, but if you need to...”

 

Her laugh sputters, start and stop. “I did talk about it. With the therapists. We talked about. Coping mechanisms.” Her fingers tighten on the cloth of her pants. “That’s it, that was all, they never... they never got it.”

 

“Got what?”

 

She wipes her face on her sleeve, furious. “I fucked up. I fucked up so badly.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

She raises her head and bumps it back against the wall. “I lost _my whole unit_ ,” she says, her voice rising. Leo tenses at the noise, but she keeps going. “Maybe we didn’t scout the site well enough. I don’t know. They keep telling me there’s no way we could have realized what was there. I don’t know. But once the- the maws attacked—” _erupted_ , more like, shrieking, undulating towers bursting out of the ground, impossibly high, mesmerizing, terrifying, “—it was just chaos, everyone lost their heads, I tried to get people organized, but there was just... nothing we could do...” Heavy weapons, maybe, could have done the job, but their rifles had been useless against the thick chitin, or whatever those things had. “We kept losing people, I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me, and finally I...” she takes a deep breath. “I ran. Up to high ground. Rocky. Instinct, I guess. Apparently that was the right thing to do. Couldn’t get anyone to follow me, I didn’t...” She’d felt so _helpless_ , shouting useless orders into the din, unheard, while the camp crashed down around them and people died in agony. Shepard shakes her head, shedding the ringing of those screams in her ears. “I was supposed to be in charge, and all I did was save myself. I fucked up.”

 

“First job is to survive, Shepard,” Leo says, firm and uncompromising.

 

“No,” she says, her hands knotting into fists. “Don’t try to tell me that. I should have done something more. I should have— it was my job to get them out. You’d never have—” she shuts her mouth on the cascade of words that’s threatening to burst free.

 

After a second, Leo huffs a quiet laugh. “You do recall how often all of us have almost gotten killed.”

 

“Operative word: almost,” Shepard mutters. “And it wasn’t—” Again, she stops herself.

 

“Wasn’t what? My fault?”

 

Shepard presses her tongue between her teeth. The silence feels glass-edged, sharp with the memory of other bad nights, when they came home bloodied and bruised, in a cloud of recriminations and self-blame. She didn’t mean to say that, quite, the thing that people had been saying to her.

 

It’s a relief when he speaks again. “You’re right. The circumstances are different. You were in a different position. Commanding a platoon of strangers is different from... what I do. If I were in your place...” He draws a breath, and Shepard flinches. It’s too easy, and to painful, to imagine it. She bites back the urge to apologize. Her unit wasn’t her family, and it’s impossible to imagine that Leonardo would let himself be the last one standing. After a short silence, he clears his throat and says, “It wasn’t your fault that those monsters appeared, Shepard. There’s only so much you can control.”

 

She shakes her head, frowning. “It doesn’t seem good enough.”

 

“Come on, you’ve seen enough fights to know this,” he says, easily enough. “I used to want to plan everything out in advance, have a strategy for everything. It’s good to have a plan. But in the end, you have to adapt to the circumstances, to the situation and the team you have. A good plan has to account for that. Maybe you made mistakes. I can’t say. I wasn’t there. Whether you did or not, you can’t undo what happened. You can only decide how you’ll respond in the future. So what would you do differently?”

 

She’s had more than enough time to think it over. To fantasize, even. “Artillery,” she mutters. “Grenades. Maybe an air strike.”

 

He chuckles. “Sounds good to me. Where are you getting it?”

 

“I...” she takes a deep breath and runs her hands over her head, the stubble rough against her hands. “We stuck it out too long. I should have organized a retreat earlier. Grabbed what weapons we could carry and backed off to higher ground. Called in reinforcements from there. Kept to the hills until we could get back-up.”

 

In her peripheral vision, she sees Leo nod. “First job is to survive.”

 

She looks at him for the first time, half afraid she’ll see pity, but there’s only warmth and resolve in his eyes. She sighs. “It was just so... chaotic. I’d been asleep. I didn’t even know what was happening right away.”

 

“Hard to make good decisions that way,” he says mildly.

 

“Yeah.” She leans her head back and looks up at the crescent moon. “I was thinking about just staying here.”

 

“We figured.”

 

“I should go back, though. I should... I have to try again if I’m going to do better.”

 

“Yes,” he says. “That’s how it works. I’m sorry.”

 

She sighs and her shoulders finally unbend, and he takes the opportunity to get her in a one-armed hug. She goes with it and leans into his side, avoiding the shell edges as best she can. The cloud cover is breaking up, letting what few stars you can see in the city shine through. “You get it, though, right?”

 

“Yeah. I get it.” The arm around her shoulders squeezes, careful, not too tight. “We were really proud when you made lieutenant, Shepard.”

 

“Me too,” she says gustily. That time, she’d written, proud and buoyant with her brand-new commission in hand. She hadn’t told them she was trying, kept back all that time shes kept applying for officer training. Eager to make something of herself. Eager to prove she had what it took to lead. She takes a breath, proud that it doesn’t hitch. “I have two more days of leave left.”

 

Another squeeze. “What do you want to do?

 

What she wants to do is... nothing special, really. Ordinary. The same ordinary stuff they’ve been doing.

 

They go back down to the lair, where Mikey’s waiting with apologies and huge eyes, and she hugs him and tells him it’s all right. Then Raph grabs her in a rough hug and Donnie offers a gentler one, saying, “If you want to talk—”

 

“Not right now,” she says, “but thanks. It’s... I’m going to be okay.”

 

She means it, she realizes, with a certain surprise. She hadn’t been sure, but she really can go back and try again. Even when it’s hard. She can learn from this, move on. Be better.

 

For the next two days, she rousts herself out of bed early enough to practice with the rest of them, and though Splinter doesn’t say anything more than comments on her performance, she can tell from the tilt of his ears and whiskers that he approves. She helps Donnie upgrade the security system and plays games with Mikey and watches vids and goes on patrol. It’s uneventful, as promised, which makes it a good evening’s run, fresh air and starlight and open space amid the view.

 

She didn’t bring much with her; it doesn’t take much time to load her few possessions into her duffel, but she does it the night before anyway.

 

“You’re going back, then,” Raph says from behind her.

 

She settles her shoulders back into place as she turns around. Damned quiet ninja. “Yeah, I am.”

 

“Leo said you were, but you hadn’t said.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“Don’t be. You should be up there.”

 

He’d said about the same thing before she enlisted. Shepard takes a deep breath. “Listen—”

 

He scowls. “Do I look like I’m here for a moment?”

 

In spite of herself, she smirks. “No. Of course not.”

 

“Good. Just came to tell you to get your ass up there where you belong, that’s all.” He settles back on his heels, arms crossed.

 

“Right. Course you did.”

 

“That’s right.” Raph nods, decisive. Shepard seizes the moment to sling an arm around his neck in a stealth hug attack, with a smug thrill of satisfaction that she caught him off guard. A moment later Mikey shouts “Are we doing this?” and they both go down under his weight, Shepard laughing and Raph cursing.

 

It’s a sunny morning as she makes her way back to the shuttleport, fresh from a last round of bruising hugs and Leo whispering in her ear, “You’ll always have a place here,” and Donnie shoving a cartridge of probably illegal omni-tool mods into her hands. She watches the shuttle traffic rise ahead of her, arcing into the sky just like the shuttle that will take her back to Arcturus. She takes a deep breath of New York air and lets it out. She can get through what’s to come: the evaluations, the reassignment, learning to do better. Her roots are deep, she has the best family anyone could ask for, and this time she won’t let herself drift away.


End file.
